Virtualization and Application Delivery

The ability of your IT organization to make sure your business is getting the application service levels it needs is being affected greatly by new technology. Nowhere is this clearer perhaps than in the area of virtualization. While virtualization in many respects opens up new possibilities and new opportunities for the data center, it also means that application delivery needs to be brought into greater focus.

Data centers are still virtualizing

As much talk as there has been about virtualization over the past several years, you might be surprised to find out that only 20% of IT organizations had actually implemented virtualization technologies in the bulk of their data center operations. In 2011, that number was closer to 32%, and it’s expected to be around 40% by the end of this year.

That means even by the end of 2012, less than half of data centers will be operating in a primarily virtualized environment. This demonstrates, to some degree, the concern than IT organizations have about virtualization and application delivery.

Key issues in application delivery

A big challenge in this regard has been in the area of inter-VM connectivity and traffic. vSwitches have some significant limitations in this regard, and so it’s much more difficult to do things like performance monitoring on inter-VM traffic.

Integrating workflow

The same holds true for integrating management tasks in the virtualized environment. Many of those typical tasks that need to happen in a non-virtualized environment need to be replicated in the virtualized environment in order to deliver the applications the way they need to be.

That means having a way to look at both the physical and virtual environments, and make sure that they are meeting the demands users have on their applications. That isn’t always an easy process, and something that’s often lacking in many virtualized implementations.

Moving forward

Whether companies are able to overcome some of these challenges will, to a large degree, determine whether they continue to move more and more applications into a virtualized environment. Insuring application delivery needs are a top priority, and moving too quickly into a virtualized architecture can dramatically affect the way that happens.

Unitiv, Inc., is a professional provider of enterprise IT solutions. Unitiv delivers its services from its headquarters in Alpharetta, Georgia, USA, and its regional office in Iselin, New Jersey, USA. Unitiv provides a strategic approach to its service delivery, focusing on three core components: People, Products, and Processes. The People to advise and support customers. The Products to design and build solutions. The Processes to govern and manage post-implementation operations.